by B Catling
But he was very different. It was said that he was hunting stillness, and that instead of picks or shovels, guns or maps, he carried an empty box on his back, a box with a single eye which ate time. Some said he carried plates of glass to serve the stillness on. He would eat with a black cloth over his head, licking his plate clean in the dark.
The Europeans and the Chinese gave him a wide berth. Such behaviour was unchristian and suspicious in these new lands, where anything might propagate and swell to dangerous consequences. The other whites said his box stole the souls of all he placed before it, but how could those who had no soul to begin with ever know? The natives were intrigued by the stories and wanted to see the hunter of quiet. He had found their sacred places and stayed close to them. He had not interfered with or desecrated their energy and power. He had sat with his box in their presence for many hours, sometimes days, and then silently moved on.
He had found a race of humans that he could tolerate, and they welcomed him into many clans, even though he was a Lost One, a most-feared being in all small, tight societies. He was a man who survived outside the tribe and the family, a man turned loose and wild. But this one had understanding and silence and was dedicated to motionlessness; all qualities which the plain’s tribes cherished. He was allowed to photograph the great chiefs and their medicine men. Eventually, they would let him see and photograph the Ghost Dance. He sent back to England prints of lonely desolation, stunning landscapes of untouched, gigantic purity and pictures of powerful, noble men, who looked into the camera without seeing themselves. Many he sent back to the wise surgeon, to demonstrate his improvement and to reiterate his gratitude; his instinct told him that the man high in the Oriel window at London Bridge would understand.
Muybridge began to feel himself healed; his growing confidence stood upright in the hollow lava beds of the flat plains of the Tule Lake. He turned his box on the Modoc War, shovelling up images of the vanquished lands and their shivering occupants. The enemy paid him well, so he became the official photographer for the U.S. Army; the stillness could wait while his plates were filled with the pumice of defeat and exile. At the end of it all, he gathered his new fame and his obsessively accumulated wages, and travelled back to the city lights and the crisp linen of San Francisco, to embark on the joys of marriage, parenthood and murder.
* * *
Ishmael had only Ghertrude to talk to now. Since their adventure together, Mutter had avoided him entirely; no matter how hard he tried to initiate conversation, the old man refused to be drawn. He barely made eye contact, and when he did it was baleful and suspicious. Ishmael thought it a dramatic and surly way to behave over such a small breaking of the rules. However, he would not be diverted by a servant’s bad humour. He had noticed the market square changing over the last two days, its simple frame being decorated between its daily functions. Something was being prepared. He cornered Ghertrude when she arrived to change his bed linen.
Her visits had become less frequent recently, and she seemed remote and uninterested in his questions. She had certainly lost her appetite for mating, having nothing new to show or explain to him. He still possessed an active interest in the subject, but when he suggested that they might try other ways of doing it, she became defensive and limp. Not wishing to disturb his comfortable position within the house, he chose to let his desires go untended.
Besides, his need to be outside again and explore the city in detail was of greater importance. She had told him of the perils, explained that a rarity such as he would be in danger from the mob. She told him the story of a small, ornate bird she had owned as a child. Its plumage was vermilion, with a trim of yellow. Its voice was exquisite, and she often put it in her window so that it might sing to the sun. Local, indigenous birds would flock to the areas nearby to listen to it and admire its splendid colours. One day she sat, with the bird tamely on her finger, talking to the brightness of its attention. She did not notice the window’s slight opening and, as the curtain swayed, the bird smelt the air and flew to freedom. In horror, she ran to the window and watched it flutter and swoop in poor, close circles. She called to it and it turned in her direction; she saw the excitement in its eyes, just before it was torn to pieces by the same grey flock that had watched it before.
That would be his fate, she had explained. His exotic originality would be seen as a threat, they would call him a monster. But he knew he was superior to the double eyes, and he had proved it. She did not know this, and the time to tell her had not yet dawned.
‘Ghertrude?’ he said, as she worked with her back to him, ‘why are the streets below being decorated?’
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed happily, ‘that’s for the carnival!’
‘And what is ‘carnival’ in this place?’ he asked.
‘Well, every year, the people have a party to thank the forest for its gifts. It lasts for three days and nights, everybody stops work, and the streets are alive with music, food and dancing. Everything is decorated, even the cathedral. The people dress in costumes that they have spent all year making. Lords and ladies mix with peasants and rogues, not knowing each other’s rank or status.’
‘How is that possible, when everybody recognises each other here?’
‘Because of the masks!’ she whooped, carried away in the joyful momentum.
‘Masks?’ he queried.
‘Yes! Fanciful, mysterious masks of every description, angels and demons, animals and mons-’
‘Monsters?’ he ventured slowly.
She had become suddenly quiet and unsure of where to look.
‘Could it be,’ he pressed, ‘that on such an occasion, a ‘rarity’ might hide its strangeness, that an exotic bird might conceal its beauty, and that a monster would be safe amongst so many others?’
And so it came to pass that the beast went the ball.
They stood just inside the gate of 4 Kühler Brunnen. They made a fine pair, plumed and bejewelled, masked and covered, loose and sensuous silks flashing provocatively beneath their cloaks.
‘Will it be like the story you read me, the one you liked so much? With the clock and the coloured rooms, the one that gave me nightmules?’ he asked.
‘Nightmares,’ she corrected. ‘Yes, but not so solemn. It will be much ruder. Everybody is drunk and behaves badly.’
‘How badly?’ he asked, apprehensively.
‘Behind a mask you can be anybody, do anything. No one is found guilty, no one is innocent; there are more children sired during these three days than the rest of the year. And no one looks too closely for family resemblance, nine months later, when the babes are born.’
‘And nobody is ever unmasked?’
‘Never!’ she said, with more certitude than she felt. It was true that one felt a certain freedom under the protection of disguise, and she had committed petty crimes and minor malices before under the mask. But she had never possessed the nerve to engage in open debauchery. Until now.
They peeped through the gap and plucked at the springboard of their nerves, readying to be jettisoned into the whirling throng of dreams that bustled and shoved in the streets outside. The noise was colossal. Hurdy-gurdies and pipers roamed the streets, confusing the vast steam organ that played from the heart of the market square. There were fireworks and pistol shots, trumpets and singing, screaming and laughter.
Suddenly, the gate was open and they were gone. Mutter locked it hard behind them and spat on to the wet cobblestones.
* * *
My gentle years are over. A long-forgotten hunger has been rekindled by my unexpected adventure, and I feel its energy course hungrily through my body. The murderer across the water has awoken a coiled reaction – I can taste his blood, even at this distance. Why anyone would find cause to shoot at me remains a mystery. My dealings with other humans are decades past, and all before that is erased. Only my wife keeps the memories in her flesh and moisture, both of which live in my bow. We will find the assassin and dig the answers out of him; my foes in
this unfamiliar and treacherous world will not remain hidden.
I will rest, and make an evening camp. In the coming morning, I will make new arrows, and use them to sign my passage and sweep all enemies aside. The man in the water will be in no hurry to meet me again, and the next time he does, the first shot will be mine.
* * *
The cleric knew he would not be alone. He slowly prepared himself behind the kitchen lean-to, at the back of the inn, deep in the animal shadow of its primitive architecture. He moved his large hands around his cane, and adjusted his hat and the side panels of his green-glass spectacles.
Walking around to the entrance, he stiffly made his way to the bar, seemingly without registering the other occupants and their irritation at his presence. He hissed the name of a drink in a foreign accent, displacing himself even further from the company’s sympathy. His back was insultingly square against the faces of the seated clientele; his eyes could not be seen, but they picked every detail out of the mirror. All movement was measured and assessed in its cracked, murky glass.
The twins exchanged a twisted look and approached him, breaking a shaft of light at the back of the room as they sauntered towards him, grinning. He stood three heads taller than they, implacable and deadly calm. The twin with the earring was rehearsing a suitably caustic and insulting address, when the cleric’s left hand crawled around from the side of his body to the small of his black back and stopped suddenly, one outstretched finger pointing menacingly towards them, statue-like in accusation. The pair froze, confused by this unpredictable and peculiar gesture. The other twin started to laugh on the strange side of his previous grin. His brother’s mouth was a wobbling slit of anger.
‘Who you pointing at, you stick-legged cunt?’ he said as he approached the hand. ‘We’ll cut your lungs out, yoooo!’
The rest of the wide body slowly turned to confront him, and he swallowed his voice in a gulp. Both hands were now pointing, a digit at each twin, the cane balanced across the stranger’s wrists like a conjuror’s wand. The face above the hands was long, broad, white and totally unnatural, a stretched, boiled egg, with tiny eyes and a flattened, broken nose. It looked unfinished and malleable, as if its shortsighted sculptor had retired midway through its creation. The twins had met and murdered all manner of men and women, but they had never come across an apparition like this before, never stood in the presence of indomitable wrongness.
With a voice like a paper cut, the cleric hissed, ‘Divided one, you have died!’ He drew the blade slowly from the cane with great deliberation, in the manner of a salesman handling a stock of priceless antiquities. As he brought it to a stop at eye-level, the room was reflected in its polished shine. Words, engraved along its length, shimmered in the light for all to see.
It was impossible to tell the span of time which had passed since the cleric’s utterance: it might have been a fraction of a second, or a full day. The ear-ringed twin jolted from his torpor, assessed the distance of the blade, and pulled a curved dagger from his coat. His trajectory was certain to maim the stranger before he could turn his blade into a defensive or aggressive posture, and he charged, eyes locked on one of the blade’s shining words: ‘TRUTH’. With all his strength, he lunged onto the blade which clicked out of the wooden cane’s other end and twitched up, across his rushing throat.
The mortally wounded twin dropped his knife, grabbing at his own neck in a hopeless attempt to strangle the flow. His brother rushed to his side, one hand on his pistol, the other hopelessly attending to the ravaged wound, not knowing whether to fight or save his twin. The debate was settled for him by the lightning point of the written sword, which pierced his eye and was pushed to the back of his brain – he caught flashes of text as the words raced past the confusion of his other oculus.
As children, both twins had received some formal education. In their early years, they had been taught the elemental principles of grammar by a country curate. Later, they attended two years at a nearby seminary, where their reading and writing skills were greatly enhanced. They had not come from the gutter, like most of their kind, but from a respected family of seed merchants; the little town where they were born had been mildly affluent. But, at the tender age of twelve, they had turned from the upstanding paths of scholar and cloth and wilfully run onto the twisted, bitter road that brought them to this place, where they now danced in their own blood.
The stranger brought his face close to the shuffling man and hissed, ‘The scripture of the blade says, THE WAY!’ – he thrust the blade in further, so that the words were deep inside – ‘THE TRUTH!’ – the point grated and stopped against the bone of the skull – ‘AND THE LIFE!’ With this, he brought his other hand down, pushing steel through bone, skewering the blade’s length through the bobbing head. He twisted the blade, the words vanishing with a crunching sliver, and then pulled it clear of the wobbling rag doll in one swift, smooth stroke. Caught in a moment of rubber balance, his victim briefly looked like a child’s toy or a dancing monkey. Still holding the dying man, the cleric cleaned the blasphemous blade on the lapel of his victim’s twitching coat, before letting him drop to the steaming floor.
The dog, inert up to that point, twitched an eye open at the sound. But it had all happened so smoothly, with such minimal movement, that there was almost nothing to be seen and, observing nothing of consequence, he stretched comfortably, lay his head back on the stony floor, and returned to his dreams.
Each action had been focused, precise and confident. It had been an execution in every meaning of the word, and the power of its malice was pristine in its inexorable certitude. There had been an air of delight about the act.
The perpetrator turned to the innkeeper, who had remained motionless throughout, and placed two heavy coins and a flat, wooden sheath on the bar. He opened the sheath and displayed a tablet of hard wood, covered in gold writing, a wax seal at its base and an insignia on the seal. The innkeeper’s gaze was fixed on the coins.
‘The money is for you to clean this away. Do you know what this is?’ The fat man nodded and avoided looking at the stranger’s face.
‘I am Sidrus, and I have jurisdiction in this sector.’ He opened his hand to reveal the same wax insignia, tattooed onto the palm of his hand. ‘How long were these two waiting here?’ he demanded.
‘Eleven or twelve days now,’ said the innkeeper, cautiously picking up the coins, and holding their weight in his closed paw. ‘Them and the other one together, the black one.’
‘And where is he?’
‘I don’t know, been gone two days now.’
The cleric knew he was telling the truth; he had been watching the inn, only entering after the other man had left. ‘Have any others passed this way in recent weeks?’ he asked.
‘Just drifters and strangers, moving on.’
The man dressed as a cleric suspected that there would be many more hunters seeking their prey, more assassins trying to kill the man with the bow, before he got close to the Vorrh. He did not know how many he would have to dispatch to protect the Bowman and allow him to make the impossible journey through the forest to the other side, where he would be waiting for him. He could not enter it at all, and had circumnavigated its perimeter to reach him. It had taken him two months to arrive in this shithole.
The bodies of the twins had stopped twitching. Stepping clear of the lake of their blood, he picked up the wooden tablet he had displayed and made for the door. A dim, gawping youth stood in his way by mistake, frozen to the spot as the incident replayed through his slow brain.
‘Kippa! Kippa, get out of the way!’ barked the innkeeper.
The cleric stopped moving and brought his sheathed cane into view. He knew there was no danger from this faint one, but he had no intention of showing mercy as the other drinkers watched; even the dog had awakened to the danger and watched him with bared teeth from beneath the table.
Kippa was still rendered immobile, unable to take his eyes away from the approaching demon.
The blade made a great, circular arc, an elaborate matador flourish that had none of the surgical precision of its previous use. On its upward swing, it cut between the youth’s legs, severing his budding manhood and sending him, toppling and screeching, out of the deliberate path of the living, grinning nightmare called Sidrus.
* * *
It crawled across the floor on all fours, its long, white proboscis sniffing, whiskers quivering as it nodded from side to side. Its rangy, pale legs seemed to both tiptoe and slide on the polished wooden floor. The top part of its body was clothed in a green, silken skin, which caught the garish light from the blazing flambeaux on the balcony outside the windows. The lower half of its body was naked, its huge, swollen phallus swaying like an independent entity as the creature approached its next engagement. The last bed was in great disarray, the covers pulled messily around the softly snoring body of its spent occupant. The room was full of whispers and laughter; small, animal noises of hunger and fulfilment rippled the landscape of opulence. Sighs gilded the tangled scent of incense, musk and intoxication.
It reached the next bed and slid its gloved hands beneath the sheet. They were instantly gripped by the smooth, trembling grasp of the woman who waited there. She pulled the beast inside and drew the covers over them both. Her form was older, large and voluptuous, and she too had a distorted face, in the shape of an owl, black feathers accentuating the ivory wideness of her eyes. He slipped a catch on his beak and pulled it backwards, leaving the lower half of his face exposed, so that his mouth was visible and active in their lovemaking. Pulling him close, she kissed him passionately. He jumped back, startled, almost falling from the bed. Neither Luluwa nor Ghertrude had ever done such a thing; it had never been explained to him, and Ghertrude had always looked away when they mated.
